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CAEN has been awarded a contract for the ALICE TPC detector upgrade at CERN

6/4/2018 >> CAEN has been selected by ALICE collaboration to provide the high voltage system for the quadruple GEM chambers of the new TPC detector

CAEN will deliver a newborn version of the A1515 board for the experiment, called the A1515QGA with the same great features of the other members of the A1515 family but specifically customized for the experimental needs. This family has been precisely designed to tackle the challenges posed by new Micro Pattern Gas Detectors (MPGD), which are a powerful solution for particle detection in high rate conditions. Extensive tests were performed with the support of CERN RD51 lab.

ALICE choice makes the A1515 family the most popular board for GEM detectors at CERN, powering the future muon detectors of CMS and ALICE. Worldwide the A1515 boards bias the GEM detectors of the KLOE and BESIII experiments at the Frascati National Laboratory in Italy and at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider II in China respectively, thus confirming CAEN as the favorite choice among physicists to power the new generation of MPGD.

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of the four main experiment at the large hadron collider (LHC), it is purposely built to study heavy ion collision and the resulting quark gluon plasma, an extreme phase of matter present for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The properties of such a phase are key issues for Quantum Chromo Dynamics, the understanding of confinement-deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. For this purpose, ALICE is designed to carry out a comprehensive study of the hadrons, electrons, muons and photon which diverse sub-detectors, one of which is the so called Time Projection Chamber (TPC) which is being upgraded for high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) to a new gas electron multiplier (GEM) system.